Generally speaking, Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) environments include software management tools which automate the control and management of software configurations. Some software management tools enable complex software systems (application programs) or portions thereof to be constructed from individually designed components. Most software management tools also enable continued and increasing development of computer software such that updated versions (releases) of computer programs are periodically made available.
One such CASE tool is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,809,170 "Computer Device for Aiding in the Development of Software Systems" and U.S. Pat. No. 4,951,192 "Device for Managing Software Configurations in Parallel in a Network". That CASE tool is made for the Domain/OS operating system of Apollo Computer and is commonly known as DSEE (Domain Software Engineering Environment), versions two and three respectively. DSEE provides source code control, configuration management, release control, task management, advice management, and user-defined dependency tracking with automatic notification. DSEE is particularly well suited for managing large-scale (1+ million lines of code) software development. As such, it supports multiple development efforts working in parallel and/or in a distributed computing environment, maintains existing releases while working on new code, coordinates code and documentation, reduces time required to build a program, and stores references of which tools and versions of source code were used to create a binary of a program.
Other CASE tools include:
MAKE--a configurations manager designed to run on an AT&T UNIX programming environment,
RCS--a source code control system that also runs on UNIX systems,
CMS and MMS--a source code controller and configuration manager, respectively, for running on Digital Equipment Corp. computers,
ALS--the Ada Language System, and
Cedar System Modeller--for handling new module versions on the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory System.
However, the foregoing CASE tools including DSEE versions two and three do not provide support for heterogeneous configuration management (HCM), i.e., configuration management among computers of different CPU type or which produce incompatible binaries.